Safely Infer
Safely Infer
The murder of a gamekeeper at Whistling Copse in 1927 (See also Under the Wire, Pheasant Moon, Twelve O’Clock Wood) was an important legal case in establishing the use of ballistics evidence as admissible in court. It was featured in a BBC television series of 1964, Call the Gun Expert, dramatising the work of Robert Churchill, a pre-eminent expert witness of his day..
The imagery in Safely Infer is sourced from photographs taken on location and, as in the other books of the series, from contemporary newspaper reports. A newspaper photograph shows a raincaped Bobby guarding the woodland scene where X visibly marks the spot. I have projected the X into the space of the book. X stands here for the facts of the case under discussion, and our interpretation of the evidence. From the evidence, what can we safely infer? What is it that juries are asked to perform with the arrangements of facts and materials that they are presented with?
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Click on the thumbnails to scroll to that part of the book. Twelve O’ Clock Wood was originally a concertina book and was conceived as one continuous image.
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